Peruvian

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The reason why I wanted to go to Uni is because the Harden’s guide said it was one of the top 10 new restaurants that opened in London in 2014. My personal view is that it could not be further from the truth. Uni is a restaurant in Victoria serving Peruvian and Japanese fusion food, another restaurant that is trying to copy the success of Sushi Samba and Nobu, which arguably introduced this fusion food to London. Uni has even hired the former Nobu chef Rolando Ongcoy to recreate this sort of food.

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M Grill and M Raw are the new M Restaurants opened by the Bank station in the City area of London. The name clearly attracted my attention, and despite M Restaurants giving them only 1 M, I have given M Raw a few more. We actually came here on the first day of the restaurants opening, so it was a bit empty, but they did not have any obvious problems that restaurants can have when they first open, so they did a great job on this first day, and our waitress was very enthusiastic.

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Lima Floral is the sister restaurant to the Peruvian restaurant Lima that opened 2 years ago and now has 1 Michelin star. I guess impressed by the success Peruvian food has had in London and by Lima’s Michelin star, the owners have opened Lima Floral. In contrast to Lima which is located in Fitzrovia, Lima Floral is in Covent Garden and my boyfriend though the building where Lima Floral was located was nicer than the Lima building. As far as inside of the restaurant goes, I have not been to Lima for a while, but I do remember Lima having more interesting traditional décor.

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This is now my favourite Peruvian restaurant in London. Andina is located in Shoreditch, close to Shoreditch House, and serves Peruvian food focusing more on the food of Andes mountains (hence the name) which is different to the food that Peruvian restaurants like Ceviche and Koya serve and in my view more interesting. Ingredients like quinoa, maca, amaranth, cape gooseberry, purple maize and many more come from Andes and a lot of these you can see in Andina. Executive Chef at Andina is Tomasz Baranski. Andina is a sister restaurant to Ceviche, one of the first Peruvian restaurants that opened in London, in Soho, and I actually prefer Andina much more as I think the menu is broader, better executed and just more interesting.

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I describe Chotto Matte to most people as a sort of wannabe restaurant, it is a mix of Zuma, Sushi Samba and Novikov yet not as good as either of them. You sort of know what Chotto Matte is trying to do, everyone in London these days likes Japanese/ Latin fusion food (restaurants like Sushi Samba, Sushinho, a trend that was started by Nobu many years ago), as it is light and funky and tasty and Chotto Matte is trying to cater to the clientele that likes this type of food. Having said these criticisms, there were some delicious dishes at Chotto Matte that I thoroughly enjoyed.

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As you probably know by now I love Peruvian food, so whenever a new Peruvian restaurant opens (this year there have been 4 opening!!) I always go there to try it out. So when I read that Coya, a Peruvian restaurant, on Picadilly, about 100m away from Hide Park Corner, had opened, I gathered some friends and arranged a dinner on a Saturday evening to go there. Coya has a formal restaurant, a lounge bar that serves the best of the restaurant food as well and also a private members lounge.

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This is the most traditional Peruvian restaurant in London. But it is a bit hard to rank this, because it serves traditional, home, cooked Peruvian food, and had this place been in Peru, I would have given it a much lower rating as every second restaurant would offer you this type and quality of food. But this place is in London, where you can’t really get traditional stuff (Ceviche and Lima are more fusion places and don’t really offer the true traditional Peruvian food), and because my boyfriend and I had been so desperate to recreate our Peruvian memories through food and drink and a bit disappointed when we went to Lima and Ceviche, purely because these places were adjusted for the European palette, we both really enjoyed it.

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I have been waiting for months for this place to open and finally it has!!! Lima (also the capital of Peru, but I am sure you know this) is a Peruvian restaurant based in Fitzrovia, and London this year seems to have been overtaken by a craze for Peruvian food. First Ceviche opened in Soho and now Lima, and all the food blogs and magazines are writing about Peruvian food and restaurants these days. I went to Peru 2 months ago and absolutely loved the country and thought the food was excellent, and as I did not like the Soho restaurant Ceviche that much when I went there a few months ago, I was hoping that with the opening of Lima, there will now be a solid, good Peruvian restaurant in London.

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I went to Malabar last spring when it was the 62nd best restaurant in the world (now it has dropped to 76th), and it used to be the second best restaurant in Lima after Gaston Acurio's Astrid y Gaston (which I have also reviewed). I thought this place was much more impressive than Astrid y Gaston and thought this should be ranked much higher and I had my best meal in Peru in this restaurant. The main chef at Malabar is Pedro Miguel Schiaffino, and he focuses on using wild amazonian produce, which to me was very interesting. I thought the dishes in this restaurant were the most creative I have ever tasted (I went here before going to Noma and Noma slightly beats Malabar in my view).

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Chicha is another one of celebrity chef's Gaston Acurio's restaurants (the other one I have reviewed is Astrid y Gaston ranked the 35th best restaurant in the world). Chicha is located in Cusco, a historical city in Peru, and so serves Gaston's take on the local traditional Andean dishes, and whilst there is less buzz about this place than about Astrid y Gaston, I almost liked this place more, also because Chicha feels more intimate as a restaurant. The name “Chicha” means a type of drink loved by the curacas and caciques in pre incan times, and today Chicha (and there are many varieties of the drink – purple, corn, peanut, etc) is drunk in several occasions, family reunions, patronal festivities and religious ceremonies.

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A Latvian girl who works in finance but has a deep passion for food! She lives to eat! :)

The website aims to share her thoughts on many of the meals she has had around the world and all the places she has visited, from michellin ranked and best restaurants in the world to casual, cool and quite cheap places.

Ratings

Maija assigns restaurants rating ranging from m (very bad) to MMMMM (very good) so the more "M"s a restaurants gets the better. Small "m"s mean half points. Note Maija gives a high rating based on the overall experience in the restaurant and also based on how delicious and enjoyable the meal was and not based on the quality or price of ingredients.